The trend is vindicating to left-wing economists, who for years have been arguing that the supply-side “skills gap” explanation for unemployment is bunk, that American workers are perfectly hirable, that unemployment is not workers’ fault, and that companies had been inflating their applicant standards because of a weak economy, not the other way around.

Throughout the Great Recession and slow recovery, CEOs made a big show of scratching their heads and asking where the qualified employees were. But it turns out their definition of “qualified” is flexible. They could have employed workers with criminal records and recreational drug-use habits all along — as well as those with little previous experience or without a college degree. Now we know corporations were bluffing, because we’re watching them drop the act in real time.

Marx’s own criticism of labor had nothing to do with this — he argued the laborer herself would become superfluous under the capitalist mode of production. Postone, who Weeks cites at one point, make the same point in his own book. The idea that labor and the working class itself would become superfluous — i.e., that a great mass of workers would themselves become unnecessary to the production of material wealth — never appears in Weeks’ book. The desperate demand of the working class for jobs is but a reflex of the material reality that, for the production of real wealth, it is entirely redundant.

Is there a connection between the superfluity of labor and the sudden cessation of labor’s demand for fewer hours? How would we know, since Weeks has no idea these two events meet in the Great Depression; when the overworked millions, who took to the street of Europe and the United States to demand reduction of hours of labor, were replaced by millions of unemployed workers in every advanced country, who no longer demand freedom from work but were forced to beg for work — any work, even in the defense industries where the means for their own destruction were built.

federal expansions of unemployment insurance benefits averted more than 1.3 million foreclosures between 2008 and 2013. Providing that extra cash to the unemployed was more effective than other federal programs specifically designed during that time to help struggling homeowners avoid default.

In Brooklyn, Mary DiGangi, the human resources director at the Menorah Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care, recently asked local employment agencies to find 20 to 25 new nursing assistants and practical nurses.

It’s a typical request, and usually, she said, “I’m flooded with applications the next day.” This time, she saw only five applications over a month.

She thinks the Trump administration’s immigration policies and rhetoric have discouraged potential workers. Menorah, part of MJHS Health System, draws heavily on immigrants for its 3,500 employees.